73: Chapter 73 Heavenly Gate Order

The air in the "Watcher" chamber was more silent than any abyss in the old Demon Realm.

This was the heart of the City of Liver Emperor, yet it had been stripped of all clamor.

Billions of isolation runes were engraved on the walls, and even light and sound seemed to be stuck by an invisible gelatin, traveling extremely slowly.

I Love Exploiting Loopholes had bloodshot eyes, staring intensely at the dozens of light screens floating in front of him.

On every light screen was a dead, ripple-less stream of data.

That call from "Earth" was like a pebble thrown into the deep sea; it stirred up a ripple and then vanished without a trace.

Yet everyone knew that the pebble was right there below, lying quietly on the bottomless seabed, changing the nature of the water.

"Damn it, this is harder to endure than the cold war with my girlfriend." A player in charge of monitoring muttered, only to be immediately glared back by a sharp look from I Love Exploiting Loopholes.

Emotions were not needed here; only waiting was.

Waiting for the... second impact, which might never come again, or might be enough to overturn the entire world in the next second.

This huge unknown lurking beneath the daily routine cast a shadow over the expedition to the Holy Land, a matter that was originally passionate and pure.

At the other end of the council hall, in a research room specially set up for the "Rule Lawyer" Outlaw Zhang San, the atmosphere was completely different.

There were no energy torrents or rune matrices here, only mountains of scrolls, jade books, and various curiosities with "rule" attributes sorted out from the spoils of war.

Outlaw Zhang San had little interest in ethereal things like the "Earth signal."

He was more obsessed with the "Heaven Gate Order" left behind by Chief Examiner in front of him.

To other players, this thing was a trophy, a token, and a key to unlock new plotlines.

But in the eyes of Outlaw Zhang San, it was a "contract," an "End User License Agreement" unilaterally issued by the world's top forces, full of logical loopholes and hidden clauses.

He did not study the material of the token, nor did he analyze the spatial energy contained within it; instead, like a top-tier jurist, he "read" the "rules themselves" of this token day and night.

He probed a tiny wisp of his divine sense into it, not to activate it, but only to "perceive."

He perceived a rule path of "one-way communication," but at the underlying layer of the path, it was attached with a hard-to-detect "spatial beacon" attribute.

He perceived the surface permission of "emergency contact," but deeper within the permission, there was a passive trigger mechanism regarding "energy response."

"Interesting... too interesting..." Outlaw Zhang San pushed up the non-existent glasses on the bridge of his nose, his face revealing a pathological, deconstructive, and fanatical smile.

"The first party of this 'contract,' Chief Examiner, gave us the right to 'make a call.' But to prevent us from abusing this right, he set harsh 'prerequisites' and 'energy thresholds'... But he forgot that any rule, once written, must have a 'program' to execute it. And as long as it's a program, there must be a backdoor!"

He stood up abruptly, grabbed the Heaven Gate Order, and rushed straight to the energy hub at the core of the city.

At that time, Liver Emperor V87 was frantically optimizing the assembly line for the expeditionary army's standard equipment.

When he saw that guy Outlaw Zhang San, whose combat power was roughly equal to a chicken, barge in, his brows furrowed so tightly they could crush a fly.

"This is a restricted area, Lawyer Zhang." Liver Emperor V87's voice was as brief and cold as always, filled with a metallic texture.

"Liver Emperor V87! I need you, the chief engineer, to help me read the attachment to this 'verdict'!" Outlaw Zhang San slapped the Heaven Gate Order onto the console in front of Liver Emperor V87, his eyes shining.

"This is a token," Liver Emperor V87 corrected.

"No! This is a beacon!" Outlaw Zhang San said decisively, "A beacon pointing to the core of the Holy Land that can be 'deceived'! That arrogant fool Chief Examiner left behind a backdoor key, but only told us it was a doorbell!"

Liver Emperor V87's eyes finally changed.

He picked up the Heaven Gate Order; this time, he no longer focused on the runes on its surface but submerged his vast, supercomputer-like perception into it.

A few minutes later, Liver Emperor V87's breathing suddenly became heavy.

He saw those "hidden clauses" that Outlaw Zhang San had mentioned.

As an engineer, he instantly translated these rule languages into "technical language" that he could understand.

"...One-way spatial anchor point... passive energy resonance... minimum energy requirement for high-dimensional spatial warping... My god." Liver Emperor V87 muttered to himself, his gaze toward Outlaw Zhang San carrying amazement for the first time.

Did this guy really crack the underlying logic of an artifact by "reading legal statutes"?

"You mean..." Liver Emperor V87's voice was a bit dry.

"I mean," Outlaw Zhang San's mouth curled into a crazy arc, "we don't need to take a boat, we don't need to walk, and we don't even need to fly. We can directly open a 'court' in the 'plaintiff's' bedroom!"

V87 understood this metaphor.

"Call I Love Exploiting Loopholes here." Liver Emperor V87 immediately ordered his assistant.

A moment later, the three "monsters" of this city—the deconstructor of rules, the destroyer of systems, and the builder of reality—stood together for the first time for the same goal.

On the light screen, the internal structure of the Heaven Gate Order was projected one-to-one by Liver Emperor V87 using his divine sense. It was a three-dimensional model composed of countless light points and lines, more brilliant than the starry sky and more complex than the abyss.

"This is the anchor point," Liver Emperor V87 pointed to the core of the model, "Its coordinates are fixed, pointing to the 'Gui Xu Spirit Eye'. Chief Examiner's original intention was for us to exhaust all our power to activate it when we face a catastrophe; he would then receive a distress signal, thereby judging our value."

"But!" Outlaw Zhang San took over the conversation, adding excitedly, "There is a loophole in this 'activation' judgment! The rule only says 'requires energy vast enough to tear through space,' but it doesn't say this energy must be provided by 'us'! It's like a keyhole; you can open it with the original key, but as long as your technique is good enough, you can also pick it with a wire!"

I Love Exploiting Loopholes had been silent, his fingers tapping rapidly on his player interface, seemingly calculating something.

Suddenly, he raised his head abruptly, his eyes filled with a trace of uncertainty.

"Wait a minute... Big Brother Liver Emperor V87, compare the energy fluctuation frequency of this anchor point with the background radiation spectrum of the 'junk signal' I captured earlier."

Liver Emperor V87 was stunned and immediately called up the data.

Two seemingly unrelated waveform charts were placed side by side.

The next second, everyone present gasped.

Different. But damnably similar!

It was like the same song; one was the original version, and the other was a pirated version that had been processed with distortion effects and distorted countless times.

"Damn it..." I Love Exploiting Loopholes cursed in a low voice, "This Heaven Gate Order is the Holy Land's official 'router.' And that signal... is a 'master key' sent from another, further place we don't know about; it's trying to crack all of our 'ports'!"

A corner of the truth was unveiled in an even more horrifying way.

"We can't wait anymore." Liver Emperor V87, who had been silent, suddenly spoke.

In his eyes burned a fanatical flame that an engineer has when facing an ultimate challenge.

"The conventional expedition plan is too slow. No one knows what kind of trouble that 'signal' will cause on the way. We must use the fastest, most unexpected way to reach the core of the battlefield directly!"

With a wave of his hand, the Heaven Gate Order model on the light screen was instantly magnified, and countless new data streams and design blueprints emerged, starting to build an unprecedented, insanely grand blueprint around that small "anchor point."

"Using the Heaven Gate Order as the 'keyhole,' the 'array compiler' we just cracked from the ancient ruins as the 'wire,' and the energy core of the entire 'City of Liver Emperor' as the 'power'..."

Liver Emperor V87's voice was not loud, but it stirred up a stormy sea in the closed room.

"We can... build a 'gate'."

"A one-way, unstable, but... interstellar gate that can precisely transport us to the vicinity of the 'Gui Xu Spirit Eye'!"

Top floor of the council hall.

When All Realms Connector finished listening to the report from the three, his eternally calm expression also appeared frozen for a full minute.

His fingers tapped unconsciously on the table, and every tap seemed to be weighing the weight of a world.

Risk?

The risk was immeasurably large.

Taking the foundation of the entire player civilization—the City of Liver Emperor—as fuel for a one-time teleportation to open a "gate" that was only theoretically established, to go to a completely unknown hinterland of the enemy's base...

This was a gamble.

But what about the benefits?

Bypass the iron-clad defense line that the Holy Land had operated for ten thousand years, bypass all predictable ambushes, and perhaps even bypass that eerie prying from "Earth" that was like a bone-eating maggot.

Descend with the momentum of thunder into the place the enemy least expects, and before they can react, seize the "key of the divine prison" to complete the strategic goal.

This is the style of the "fourth calamity"!

"Do it."

After a long time, All Realms Connector only said these two words.

But these two words were like an oracle, instantly reaching every nerve ending of this war behemoth.

"Notify the 'Expedition Council' that the original plan has changed." All Realms Connector stood up, walked to the huge floor-to-ceiling window, and looked down at the city still running feverishly below.

"Plan code name, 'Justice from the Sky'."

"All production-class players, stop your current tasks. All combat-class players, switch to combat readiness state. We have only one new goal—"

His voice, through the amplification magic array, sounded in every corner of the city.

"Dismantle the city beneath our feet, and use its skeleton to build me a ladder to the enemy's home base!"

At that moment, the roaring sound of the "City of Liver Emperor" briefly paused for a second.

Immediately following was a sky-high, even more fanatical cheer.

They didn't know what the "Earth signal" was, nor did they know the risks hidden behind the "interstellar gate."

They only understood the last sentence.

Dismantle the city! Build the gate! Do something big!

At the very core of the city, Liver Emperor V87 had already unfolded a huge engineering blueprint.

In the center of that blueprint was a huge, deep, circular doorway that seemed to be able to swallow everything.

And what constituted this gate were the countless factories, towers, and energy pipelines of the "City of Liver Emperor."

This miraculous city floating in the air was about to begin its ultimate transformation, like a giant Transformer.

Its goal was no longer to conquer the land beneath its feet.

But to tear through... that starry sky above.